


The Long Road Home

by Mals86



Series: Journey [1]
Category: Warrior (2011)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Drug Use, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Family Drama, Military, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-17
Updated: 2015-11-19
Packaged: 2017-12-29 16:50:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1007766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mals86/pseuds/Mals86
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a long, long way back to the place where Tommy Conlon ought to be. Through loss and grief and PTSD, through learning to trust and making connections, he gets there and finds that maybe it's sweeter for having gone through the trials.</p><p>I adore comments, particularly if they're character observations! I'd love for you to leave them for me.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Fifteen Months

**Author's Note:**

> As always, I make no claim to own any intellectual material associated with the film or script. I own only my original characters and this plot.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Events taking place shortly after the end of the film.

Fifteen months. And he'd lost the Corps.

But in some ways, he'd been lucky.

For one thing, the court-martial was quick; they hadn't made him wait months in a cell for a hearing. It was two days after Sparta, right after the shoulder surgery, when his assigned JAG, his judge advocate general attorney, showed up at the hospital to plan his defense, and the guy was both competent and sympathetic. He'd told Lt. Wayland everything – _everything_ , from Pop's service in Nam to Tommy's childhood concussion, from Mom's broken bones to her death from lung cancer, from high school wrestling champ to nobody-from-nowhere without a soul in the world to turn to for help. From his enlistment and his friendship with Manny Fernandez to the hell of serving in a place where doing your job meant people died, where the reality of his daily life meant blood and pain and noise and fear and other people's terror, where nothing he did helped, where no matter how many pleas he spent on getting PFC Caleb Ward, whose nightmares kept the whole squad awake, sent home, they were futile, to that dreadful day when bombs rained and everywhere he looked there was betrayal and another dead brother. From Colt Boyd's gym to Pop's AA to Brendan's family. And when he'd gotten to telling about fighting Brendan in the cage, the torn shoulder muscle, the takedown, Brendan holding him there in so much pain and not letting go, not letting him go this time, Brendan yelling love into his ear – then, he could stop telling. Finally.

Wayland was black, from Chicago, one of the guys who'd gotten out of single-parent drug hell by enlisting and working through college and then law school. He'd told Tommy all this while he was setting up to tape the deposition and take notes, and either Tommy was all soft after the fight, or he was too tired to resist the help, because he didn't clam up when Wayland said, "So. Tell me what happened. I got all day, so take your time." Wayland had sat silent for a good five minutes when Tommy ran out of steam, and then he'd said, "I feel you, man." Tommy just sat. His shoulder was hurting like hell, but he was determined to get off the oxycodone as soon as possible, so he would push his next dose off at least half an hour. The stuff made him fuzzy-headed anyway. "Got a couple questions for you," Wayland finally said. "How'd you get out of Iraq and back to the States, anyway? And what did you do when you got here?"

Oh. That. So he explained the unlikely string of circumstances, letting Wayland gape and insist that such a thing wasn't possible, except that it was, because here he sat, didn't he? "I didn't even plan it, man," he'd told Wayland. "I just wanted out. I didn't think. So I headed out, and I kept expecting somebody would stop me, but they didn't."

"And you ran across those guys then, when you ripped the door off the tank?"

"Yeah. Couldn't just let 'em drown. Anyway, it must've been about eight separate times that I should have gotten busted, but I didn't, and I wound up back in Texas, and I hustled a couple of games of pool to get some cash to live on. Ran out of money in Topeka, and got into a bar fight with a guy, and this small-time fight manager recruited me to fight a couple of official bouts. So I did that some, but he was cheating me out of my pay because I didn't have ID, so then I bought a bus ticket to Pittsburgh. Because what else could I do?"

Wayland looked at him a minute, head on one side. Then he'd said, "I heard this thing once. 'Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.' Robert Frost. Poet of America. That make sense, dude?"

It did.

Harder to explain was the delay between the time he got back and the time he'd been caught. He could have turned himself in at any point as a soldier shaken by friendly fire and rattled by PTSD, gotten some counseling, been disciplined, and sent back to finish his tour, and he'd probably still have been forgiven. But now? Wayland was sorry, but this was serious. He'd do his best, and he'd have to get the military psychiatrist on board with it (great, a psychiatrist?), but the Corps was likely to take an extremely dim view of desertion in time of war. He'd see what he could do. What did Tommy want? Did he want Wayland to ask for the DD?

God, not that. Tommy had shaken his head, firmly. He'd said, "Maybe I ran out on the Corps, but as far as I'm concerned, the Corps cheated on me first. I wanna patch it up. If I can." Wayland nodded, fist-bumped Tommy, and then he went off to talk to people, turning wheels and making deals.

The TV news people came, Wayland fended them off. Fan mail came. He didn't read it. He avoided the newspapers, avoided the TV news, but people tended to stare. He sat in bed some, and in the rec room some, wearing a robe and sweats and a sling, and playing cards one-handed.

Brendan came to see him every day, and Pop came and sat in the waiting room, waiting until Tommy was ready to see him, and after four days he was, and Pop came in and sat by the bed on Tommy's bad side, the side away from the door, like he was going to sit there until Kingdom Come, but he didn't say anything for the better part of an hour. He just sat there, and he put his big old paw over Tommy's hand, and they just... sat, and it was okay. Finally Pop cleared his throat, in that gravelly way he had, and he said, "You know I got four days under my belt now, Tommy." He'd just nodded. He'd known from the clean smell of his father's skin, the clearness of his eyes. The beginnings of peace were there, in his gaze and his big powerful body. And when Pop had got up to go, he'd kissed Tommy on the top of his head and muttered something that might have been "love you."

On the fifth day he'd been issued boots and uniforms, a couple of sets of cammies and one of Service Alpha, with his name tape and his pins and medals, and they'd given him a haircut. He was discharged into MP custody and moved somewhere else, a lockup area where he was in a room instead of a cell, probably because of the injury. He saw the psychiatrist, he talked. He saw Wayland, he listened. On the tenth day, he was down to the smallest dose of oxycodone that could manage his pain and leave him clear-headed, and he put on the Service Alphas, and the MP's escorted him to his court-martial.

That's still a blur to him. On Wayland's advice he'd opted for judicial hearing, and the guy on the bench looked a whole lot like the toughest SOB Tommy'd ever known, his drill sergeant, and somehow this made it easier for him to relax his shoulders and raise his head and look the judge in the eye: sorry, but ready to make it right. Because he was.

Wayland had lined up everybody he could think of to testify. Two of Tommy's old CO's offered character testimony via videocam, and a couple of the guys he'd saved with the tank. Three Congressmen and a Senator offered written support. The Corps psychiatrist, a Major Abramson, offered some explanations and analysis and recommendations. But none of this was going to matter much, Tommy saw, when his battalion CO walked in ready to testify, with fury in his eye. The battle details were gone over, and it had become clear that the friendly-fire disaster had tarnished quite a few careers, but that wasn't going to matter either.

"We recovered 38 sets of dog tags from the area," Lt. Col. William Hamblin stated, eyes not on his questioner but on Tommy, "so the thinking was that we'd lost that entire platoon. It was only later, through the remains-identification process, that we realized we were short a body." "Body," Tommy reflected silently, is a pretty optimistic way of describing the things that were left after a bombing like that. Still, everyone got the point. "We were able to identify 36 Marines, and there was only enough material to identify one other. We knew it was either PFC Isaac Farmer or Staff Sgt. Conlon, because we didn't have next-of-kin DNA to match against for either one of them. I kept telling the guys it had to be Conlon, because there was no way he'd have taken off. Not Conlon. No way." Hamblin's voice was steady, but the blame and disappointment in it were plain, and Tommy had to grit his teeth to keep his body from bending in half from pain and guilt and shame. "Staff Sgt. Conlon displayed leadership and bravery under fire. He was constantly concerned for the well-being of the soldiers in his command. He was an exemplary Marine, exemplary... until he wasn't. And I cannot express how much that wounds me."

Wayland tried to show Tommy's actions as the result of extreme emotional turmoil as the result of battle shock, combined with his childhood background and the feelings of betrayal due to being fired upon by his own side. However, Lt. Col. Hamblin's testimony had left the bare fact of Tommy's desertion sitting there under the unforgiving glare of military judgment: he'd left his unit. Yes, true, somebody in Marine Corps Aviation had royally screwed up and fired on their own troops. Yes, true, every other guy in his whole platoon was dead, thirty-seven Corps brothers lying on the sand in a welter of blood and body parts, and he'd been shocked and concussed, but he'd left his unit. The company's other platoon hadn't been far away, and Tommy could have headed that way – but he hadn't. He could have turned himself in at any point – but he hadn't. He'd committed the cardinal sin of leaving men behind, and never mind that, somehow, he'd left himself behind too.

He could see the dishonorable discharge coming, and he could feel the weight of it pressing down on him, making it hard to breathe and hard to keep paying attention. Only the sound of the judge's voice, asking him to rise for the reading of the verdict, snapped his head up.

The verdict: Staff Sgt. Thomas R. Conlon would be stripped of his rank. Course of treatment to be undergone with a military psychiatrist. Confinement of fifteen months to be served at a military prison facility such as the one at Ft. Leavenworth, or the Marine Corps brig at Quantico. Forfeiture of pay and benefits for the time period starting from the date of the desertion. Dishonorable discharge, effective immediately upon completion of confinement.

The top of his head went cold.

DD. That meant no veterans' benefits: no pension, no medical care, no GI Bill. He'd just lost his right to own a firearm, not that he ever wanted to touch a gun again. It would be difficult to find a job. Worst, he'd lost the Corps – not just his active service, but he'd be shunned and shamed by anybody who knew of the sentence.

He'd lost the Corps, forever. It had been family for so long.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love this movie. The surprise was on me, because I saw the ads and said to myself, "Ohhhh, yeah, another one of those movies for guys who like to watch Roadhouse and play with themselves. Nah, don't wanna see that." BUT. Tom Hardy has become my new actor crush – I think he's truly astounding, very talented, an incredibly skilled and subtle actor. (Doesn't hurt that he's easy on the eyes, too.) I'd seen him as Bane in the Batman flick and then in a rerun of a 2009 PBS production of Wuthering Heights, tearing up the joint as the larger-than-life revenge machine, Heathcliff, and then I remembered that I'd also seen him as the unreliable, pretty-boy agent Ricki Tarr in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (and had promptly forgotten him, having been dazzled by Gary Oldman). I saw the trailers for Lawless, which interested me because I grew up in the Virginia county that sits just north of Franklin County, and the Bondurant boys are still legendary around those parts. Hardy's turn as the laconic but violent Forrest Bondurant made me laugh and then catch my breath, and THEN I caught "Warrior" on Netflix.
> 
> It blew me away. I'd have said that a film about men punching the crap out of each other in a cage would have nothing to say about family, or love, or loyalty, and I'd have been dead wrong. If you're reading this, you know.
> 
> I will say that there are plot holes in the thing that you could drive a combat vehicle through. This bothers me, because the entire story is sort of built on some scaffolding over the holes. For example, #1: Tommy managed to get back to the US from Iraq, from a military installation? Unlikely to the point of utter ridiculousness – those guys have to have written orders to fly on military flights, and they don't carry passports on patrol, and there's no way to take a civilian flight without a passport. In fact, as of 2013 there is only one report of a desertion in Iraq. It's just too difficult to escape from in that situation. So, how'd Tommy make it back to the US of A? It's a complete mystery, and my mind says impossible. In which case we'd have no story at all, so I'm going to call it a miracle and let it go.
> 
> #2: when he disappeared from a battle area, nobody contacted his next of kin? Either he was dead, in which case the Marines would have gone looking for next of kin, because you have to list that on your forms, and whose name would he have used? OR they knew he was a deserter, and the Marines don't let you just slide by on your merry way. They'd have gone looking. They go backwards from previous addresses, if necessary, and since dear old Dad hasn't moved, the military would have been certain to have checked with Paddy about the death/disappearance of his younger son. We know he enlisted under his real name.
> 
> #3, the Sparta organizers didn't ask for Tommy's birth certificate/driver's license? Of COURSE they would have. You have to have positive identification for the IRS, if for no other reason. And then they'd have had his real name, his Social Security Number, and everything else they'd need to find out who he really was. Puh-leese.
> 
> You will notice that I say nothing about the MMA/UFC inaccuracies I'm certain are there. That is because a) I don't know a blamed thing about it, and b) I don't really care. The emotional story, however, that absolutely rocks. And since that is mostly what people seem to be coming here for, I'll oblige you. And I do tend to write author's notes with installments, but I won't get quite so chatty in the future – sorry about this one being a book on its own!
> 
> Regarding the court-martial sentence: I did some research. The script has Tommy admitting to deserting his unit. Desertion in time of war is a pret-ty dang serious offense, and the maximum prescribed sentence is "death or life in prison, as a court-martial may direct." Desertion with intent to avoid hazardous duty has a prescribed maximum sentence of "dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, reduction to the lowest enlisted grade, and confinement for 5 years." And while it's possible that a military judge might be swayed by heroism, or a diagnosis of trauma/PTSD, it is NOT likely. It is, in fact, an open secret that Marines don't officially believe that PTSD exists - that there are only soldiers who keep to the code, and soldiers who do not, and it is extremely difficult to receive a medical discharge attributable to PTSD. Since 2001, no US soldier has served more than two years confinement for the military crime of desertion.


	2. Update, Notice, and Apology

I know, I know… what am I doing updating a completed story? Confusing.

However, bear with me a minute. I wanted to explain that I would be removing most of my multi-chapter fics from this site and from Fanfiction net. The reason is that one of my bestest writer-buddies, Wynter S. Komen, just found out that someone had STOLEN her story, "In the Land of Gods and Monsters," from Fanfiction, changed some details, and published it as a Kindle ebook. For sale. For money. In fact, not one but two different people (or the same person with two different pen names) stole her story and published it, and profited from someone else's work.

And while I am beyond grateful to both Fanfiction and Archive of Our Own for providing a platform and an outlet for those of us who love stories to share them, free, out of our hearts, I'm no longer willing to risk having stories stolen and sold. I will be leaving my profile here, as well as my two short fics and the first chapters of my longer fics, but everything else will be removed.

I'm sorry.

I'm hurt, too. I am proud of these stories I've posted here, and sad that they're going to be tucked away and not read anymore. I know that if you've come here to read this story, you're disappointed too. I am still enormously glad that I've met so many terrific readers and writers through the fanfiction sites, and I am thankful every day for the opportunity I had to share stories.

It's making me super-sad to remove most of this fic, the first one that I ever really completed and saw through, beginning to end.

I will not be posting any new stories or resurrecting the ones I've removed. I feel that this chapter of my writing life has closed – and we all know that feeling, don't we? Where you're satisfied by the happily-ever-after part but sad that it's finally arrived. I'll be pursuing publication of my original works, at this point.

I want to wish you all continued happy reading on this site. If you'd like to contact me, please do – I will be reachable at wynn AT wynnguthrie DOT com (sorry about the bot-defeating strategy there).


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